Matthew D. Lassiter is an associate professor of history and of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, where he teaches courses about modern U.S. history, urban/suburban history, political history, and the wars on crime and drugs. He is the author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006), winner of the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Book Award. His Journal of Urban History article, “The Suburban Origins of ‘Color-Blind’ Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis,” was republished in The Best American History Essays 2006 (2006). He is also a coeditor of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (2010) and The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (1998). His current book project is “The Suburban Crisis: The Pursuit and Defense of the American Dream.”